>> Announcer: Live from the Moscone Center,
it's theCUBE covering AWS Summit San Francisco,
2018, brought to you by Amazon Web Services.
(techy music playing)
>> Welcome back, I'm Stu Miniman joined by
my cohost Jeff Frick, and this is theCUBE's
live coverage of AWS Summit San Francisco.
We are thrilled to welcome back
to the program Sandy Carter, who's
a vice president with Amazon Web Services.
Been with the company about a year.
We've had you on the program many times,
but first time since you've been at AWS, so...
>> That's right, I'm celebrating my
year yesterday with Amazon Web Services.
>> Stu: And no cake, all right.
>> I had a cake yesterday, actually,
cake and champagne, by the way. (laughing)
>> Sandy, we always love to hear, you know,
you talk to so many customers, you know,
bring us back for a little bit.
What brought you to AWS, what's exciting to your
customers when you're talking to them today?
>> Well, you know, I really love innovation,
I love being innovative, and you know,
bar none Amazon is the most innovative company
out there today, but really what brought me
to Amazon was their focus on the customer,
really "obsession" on the customer.
When they say obsession they really mean obsession.
They work backwards from the customer.
We really have this big, big thrust.
In fact, one of my favorite stories
is when I first came to Amazon we'd be
in these meetings and people would say,
"Well, what does Low Flying Hawk think about this,"
or "What does Low Flying Hawk think about that,"
and I was like, "Who is Low Flying Hawk?"
Well, he's a person who would give comments
on a forum and just a person who wasn't
even spending millions of dollars
with Amazon but just had a lot of big clout.
We actually just opened a building
named Low Flying Hawk, believe it or not.
>> Jeff: Have you identified this person?
>> They do know who he is, yes.
(laughing)
But it's really, it just symbolizes the focus that
Amazon has on the customer and why that's so important.
>> And Sandy, at re:Invent you actually, you spoke
to the analyst, I was listening to the session.
It's not just kind of, people think
AWS they think public cloud.
You work for Amazon, it's everything kind of
across what you think of Amazon.com, AWS,
everything from drones and using
Kindles and everything like that.
Can you give us a little bit of kind of
that pan view of how Amazon looks at innovation?
>> Yeah, so it's really interesting.
Amazon is very methodical in the way
that we innovate, and what we do
is we really try to understand the customer.
We work backwards from the customer,
so we do a press release first, we do frequently asked
questions next, and then we do a narrative--
>> You're saying you do an internal press release, yes, yes.
>> Yeah, internal press release.
Internal frequently asked questions,
and then we review a six-page document,
no PowerPoints whatsoever, which enables us
to debate and learn from each other
and just iterate on the idea that makes it
better and better and better so that when
we come out with it it's a really powerful idea
and powerful concept, something
that the customers really want.
>> So, we'll ask you what you're doing now,
but one more kind of transition question,
what was your biggest surprise?
You know, there's a lot of kind of mystery
from people on the outside looking in
in terms of culture, and we know it's car driving
and innovative growing like crazy company,
not only in business but in terms of people.
What was your biggest surprise once
you kind of got on the inside door?
>> My biggest surprise was just how incredibly
encouraging and supportive the team is at AWS.
My boss is Matt Garman, he's been supportive since
day one, you know, Andy, they just cheer you on.
They want you to do well and I've really never
been at a company that everybody's really
pulling for you to be successful, not political infighting
but really pulling for you to be successful.
So, that's really was the biggest surprise
to me, and then that customer obsession.
Like, it's not customer focus,
it really is customer obsession.
>> Right, I think it's so well illustrated by the,
again not AWS, but Amazon with the store,
right, with no cash register, no people.
>> Sandy: Amazon Go.
>> To think about that-- >> Sandy: Yeah.
>> From the customer point of view
is nobody likes to stand in line at the grocery store,
so it's such a clean illustration of
a customer centric way to attack the problem.
>> And I love that because what we did
is we opened up the beta first for employees,
so we would go in and play with it and test it out,
and then we opened it up in Seattle
and we would give customer tours.
Now it's open to the public in Seattle,
so it just again shows you that iterative process
that Amazon uses and it's super cool, have you guys been?
>> Jeff: Have not been.
>> Ugh, in fact, my daughter went in.
She put on a mask, she was going to fool
the system but it wasn't fooled.
All the ML and all the AI worked brilliantly.
>> I love how everyone loves to get so creative
and try to, you know, get through the system,
right, try to break the system.
>> I know, but my daughter, that's what
I would figure for sure. (laughing)
>> So, what are you working on now?
You've been there a year, what are you working on?
>> So, we are innovating around the enterprise workload,
so we know that a lot of startups and cloud native
companies have moved to the cloud,
but we're still seeing a lot of enterprises
that are trying to figure out what their strategy is,
and so, Stu and Jeff, what I've been working on
is how do we help enterprises in the best way possible.
How can we innovate to get them
migrated over as fast as possible?
So for instance, we have Windows that runs on AWS.
It's actually been running there longer
than with any other vendor and we
have amazing performance, amazing reliability.
We just released an ML, machine learning OMI
for Windows so that you can use and leverage
all that great Windows support and applications
that you have, and then you guys
saw earlier I was talking to VMware.
We know that a lot of customers want to do
hybrid cloud on their journey to going all-in
with the cloud, and so we formed this great partnership
with VMware, produced an offering called VMware Cloud
on AWS and we're seeing great traction there.
Like Scribd's network just talked about
how they're using it for disaster recovery.
Other customers are using it to migrate.
One CIO migrated 143 workloads
in a weekend using that solution.
So, it just helps them to get to that
hybrid state before they go all-in on the cloud.
>> So, are they, I was going to say, are they building
a mirror instance of what their
on-prem VMware stack is in the Amazon version?
Is that how they're kind of negotiating
that transition or how does that work?
>> So, with VMware they don't have to refactor,
so they can just go straight over.
With Microsoft workloads what we're seeing
a lot of times is maybe they'll bring
a sequel app over and they'll just do a lift and shift,
and then once they feel comfortable with the cloud
they'll go to Aurora, which as you've found
was the fastest growing service that AWS has ever had,
and so we see a lot of that, you know, movement.
Bring it over, lift and shift, learning and you know,
if you think about it, if you're a large enterprise
one of your big challenges is how do I
get my people trained, how do I get
them up to speed, and so we've done...
Like, we've got a full dot net stack
that runs on AWS, so their people don't
even have to learn a new language.
They can develop in Visual Studio and use PowerShell
but work on AWS and bring that over.
>> You know, Sandy, bring us inside your customers
because the challenge for most enterprises
is they have so many applications.
>> Sandy: Yeah.
>> And you mentioned lift and shift.
>> Sandy: Yeah.
>> You know, I know some consultant's out there
like, "Lift and shift is horrible, don't do it."
It's like, well, there's some things
you'll build new in the cloud, there's some things
you'll do a little bit, and there's some stuff
today lift and shift makes sense and then
down the road I might, you know, move and I've seen,
you know, it was like the seven Rs that Amazon has
as to do you re-platform, refactor--
>> That's right.
>> You know, all that and everything, so I mean,
there's many paths to get there.
What are some of the patterns you're hearing from customers?
How do they, how is it easier for them
to kind of move forward and not get stuck?
>> Well, we're seeing a lot of data center evacuations,
so those tend to be really fast
movement and that's typically--
>> Jeff: Data center evacuation--
>> Yeah, that's what--
>> I haven't heard that one.
>> Yeah, that's what, evacuation, they've got to
get out of their data center buyer for a
certain date for whatever reason, right?
They had a flood or a corporate mandate
or something going on, and so we are seeing those
and those are, Stu, like lift and shift quickly.
We are seeing a lot of customers who will
create new applications using containers
and serverless that we talked about today a lot,
and that's really around the innovative,
new stuff that they're doing, right.
So, Just Eat, for instance, is a large...
They do online food service out of the UK.
I love their solution because what they're doing
is they're using Alexa to now order food,
so you can say, "Alexa, I want a pizza delivered
"in 20 minutes, what's the best pizza place
"that I can get in 20 minutes?"
Or "I want sushi tonight," and Alexa will
come back and say, "Well, it's going to take
"an hour and a half, you had sushi two days ago.
"Maybe you want to do Thai food tonight."
(laughing)
And so it's really incredible, and then they even innovated
and they're using Amazon Fire for group ordering.
So, if there's a big football game
or something going on they'll use
Amazon Fire to do that group ordering.
All that is coming in through Alexa,
but the back end is still Windows on AWS.
So, I love the fact that they're creating
these new apps but they're using some of that
lift and shift to get the data and the training
and all that moving and grooving, too.
>> Yeah, what do you, from the training standpoint,
how, you know, ready are customers to retrain
their people, you know, where are there shortages
of skillsets, and how's Amazon, you know,
helping in that whole movement?
>> Well, training is essential because you've got
so many great people at enterprises
who have these great skills, so what we see
a lot of people doing is leveraging
things like dot net on AWS.
So, they actually...
They have something they know, dot net,
but yet they're learning about the cloud,
and so we're helping them do that training
as they're going along but they
still have something very familiar.
Folks like Capital One did a huge training effort.
They trained 1,000 people in a year on cloud.
They did deep dives with a Tiger Team on cloud
to get them really into the architecture
and really understanding what was going on,
so they could leverage all those
great skills that they had in IT.
So, we're seeing everything from,
"I got to use some of the current tools that I have,"
to "Let me completely move to something new."
>> And how have you, you've been in the Bay Area
also for about a year, right, if I recall?
>> Actually, I just moved, I moved to Seattle.
>> Jeff: Oh, you did make the move, I was going to say--
>> I did. (laughing)
>> "So, are they going to make you move up north?"
>> I did because I was--
>> You timed it in the spring, not in November?
>> I did, there you go. (laughing)
When it's nice and sunny, but it's great.
>> Exactly.
>> It's great to live in Seattle.
Amazon has such a culture that is in person,
you know, so many people work there.
It's really exhilarating to go into the office
and brainstorm and whiteboard with people right there,
and then our EBCs are there, so our executive
briefing center is there, so customers come in
all the time because they want to go see Amazon Go,
and so it's really an exciting, energizing place to be.
>> Yeah, I love the line that Warner used
this morning is that AWS customers are builders
and they have a bias for action.
So, how do you help customers kind of translate
some of the, you know, the culture that Amazon's
living and kind of acting like a startup
for such a large company into
kind of the enterprise mindset?
>> That's a great question, so we just proposed
this digital innovation workshop.
We are doing this now with customers.
So, we're teaching them how to work backwards
from the customer, how to really understand
what a customer need is and how to make sure
they're not biased when they're getting
that customer need coming in.
How to do, build an empathy map and how to write
that press release, that internal
press release and think differently.
So, we're actually teaching customers to do it.
It's one of our hottest areas today.
When customers do that they commit
to doing a proof of concept with us
on AWS on one of the new, innovative ideas.
So, we've seen a lot of great and exciting
innovation coming out of that.
>> All right, well, Sandy Carter, so glad
we could catch up with you again.
Thanks for bringing discussion of innovation,
what's happening in the enterprise
customers to our audience.
For Jeff Frick, I'm Stu Miniman,
we'll be back will lots more coverage
here, you're watching theCUBE.
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